OpenStack 'Bexar' Release Adds Cross-Hypervisor Support

The open source cloud project is adding ease-of-use features, support for Hyper-V, and "getting started" documentation.

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There's another, behind-the-scenes factor potentially driving implementations, said Jim Curry, Rackspace CTO, also known as the chief OpenStack stacker, in an interview. OpenStack will be included in the next distribution of Ubuntu Linux, Natty Narwhal 11.04, from Canonical. Ubuntu is currently the most frequently submitted Linux distribution accompanying workloads running in Rackspace's cloud service.

"These guys (Canonical) are going to make it a lot easier to stand up an OpenStack Cloud," Curry noted.

When Ubuntu is the operating system of a Rackspace physical host running several workloads, its activities and data are made readily available to the OpenStack cloud management layer, noted Jesse Andrews, co-founder of Anso Labs, the technical developer of NASA Nebula and an OpenStack supporter, in an interview.

Other features in the Bexar release include: support for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, contributed by Cloud.com with help from Microsoft. OpenStack previously listed support for Red Hat's KVM and Citrix Systems' XenServer. "OpenStack is designed to be hypervisor agnostic," said Collier.

Support for the missing hypervisor on the list, VMware's ESX Server, will be added later this year, he said. OpenStack contributors are already at work on the support, including developers from Citrix Systems, who gained knowledge of ESX Server as they built conversion tools for the Open Virtual Machine format (OVF). VMware has its own set of cloud building software, called vCloud, with its own ESX Server virtual machines as the target supported workload. It is not a member of the OpenStack alliance. Collier said it is "welcome to join at any time."

Object Storage can now support storage of files of unlimited sizes. Object Storage and OpenStack Compute have also been more tightly integrated.

The next OpenStack release, due in April, will include support for live migration of virtual machines in a cloud environment.

Vendors behind the OpenStack project also now include the networking giant Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, and Grid Dynamics, bringing the total to over 50 members. Microsoft, Intel, and Citrix were among its earlier supporters.

Competitors include Amazon Web Services with its market-leading EC2 cloud, Eucalyptus Systems with its Amazon-compatible API set, VMware with its proprietary vCloud line, and Nimbula Systems, with its open source Director cloud operating system.

Enterprise cloud adoption has evolved to the point where hybrid public/private cloud designs and use of multiple providers is common. Who among us has mastered provisioning resources in different clouds; allocating the right resources to each application; assigning applications to the "best" cloud provider based on performance or reliability requirements.